Tag Archives: Computing

When Bradley Wiggins came to Guernsey I was asked, as one of the few deputies that cycle regularly, whether I’d be willing to be part of the deputies against the civil service cycle race. Given that it all seemed to be in good sport, the fact that I consider Sir Bradley to be an excellent rôle model for young people today and the opportunity to beat other deputies (even if it was on something other than debate), I decided to take part.

Sunday morning came and I pulled on a t-shirt, cycling shorts and my cycling shoes ready for the occasion. As I approached the front and heard the cheering crowds for the children’s race, saw proud parents beaming with joy as to their child’s participation, I considered what a good event this was, enthusing people of all ages about cycling and, thanks to the weather, the fact that rain isn’t a barrier to healthy traveling.

I registered for the race, pinned the number to my chest and quickly noticed how healthy, svelte and fit most of the civil servant participants looked in comparison to the deputies. I also noticed how a number of deputies that were meant to participate evidently preferred their bed on a wet Sunday morning to the joys of cycling.

As we moved onto the road, ready for the race, I was asked where my cycle helmet was, to which the response was

“I don’t wear a helmet”

The look of horror and disgust on people’s faces was surprising. I had evidently crossed a line that was not to be crossed and challenged the modern orthodoxy of elf ‘n safety. How dare I suggest cycling without a helmet. Being the person that I am I suggested that they made no difference to safety and weren’t effective. Evidently a mistake, not only was I considered misguided, I was also unwilling to repent for my defiance of the orthodoxy.

So let me put the record straight. I don’t disagree with those people that chose to wear cycle helmets, as with anything in life, I’m a great believer in personal choice. But I simply don’t believe that cycle helmets are beneficial. The evidence that we have available does raise some very real questions about the cost benefit of them, the long term disbenefits of their promotion and the fallacy that, as a society, we pay increased health costs for those that disregard orthodox health and safety.

Let’s start with the benefits of cycling. There is strong evidence to show that people who cycle regularly, even if they already undertake regular exercise, enjoy substantial health benefits (Froböse, 2004 and Cavill & Davis, 2007) . These benefits include

Boost of Immune System

Muscle Strengthening and Maintenance

Increased Bone Density

Reduced risk of Back Pain and Disc Problems

Balance & Equilibrium Maintenance

Heart & Cardiovascular Improvements

Body Fat Reduction

There are many other direct benefits, as well as the indirect environmental benefits of less people producing pollutants from driving, reduced noise pollution of traffic etc. All of these direct and indirect benefits are substantial in their cost saving to our health economy.

No one disagrees with these sentiments, but I do hear you ask “what has helmet wearing got to do with these benefits”. Well the answer is not obvious at first, but the evidence is clear. The more we do to demand helmet wearing either by direct legislation or simple encouragement, the less people cycle.

The most extreme example is Australia, where compulsory helmet laws have seen drops in usage. I’d like to refer specifically to Victoria where the number of children cycling has has seen a reduction of between 36% and 46% since making helmet wearing compulsory.
More telling is the cycle scheme that they have in Melbourne, where a city of 4 million people attracts fewer than 650 subscribers to the scheme. During four months the number of cycle rides were 20,700 journeys averaging around 300 per day.
Compare this with Dublin, where there is no compulsory helmet law, and a city of 1.7 million people attracts 47,000 subscribers. In the first twelve months the number of rides were 1.1 million with the average daily journeys being a staggering 5,000.

So why the difference. Admittedly, the cost of the Melbourne scheme is nearly four times the Dublin scheme, but despite this it remains competitive on cost to other forms of transport. As I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear, most analysts place the reason for the difference firmly at the feet of Victoria’s compulsory helmet laws.

“But we’re not facing a compulsory cycle helmet law” I hear you say. Well thank goodness no, but before we start relaxing, there is evidence that UK local authorities that undertook cycle helmet promotion saw a marked decrease in cycling. The table below gives a measure of the decline:

Focused campaign held 1994 – 1996

Change in helmet wearing

Change in cycle counts

Yes (11 authorities)

+ 4.1%

– 2.8%

No (18 authorities)

+ 0.8%

+ 4.9%

p < 0.001, sample approx 20,500 cyclists

Therefore the evidence is clear, increasing helmet promotion reduces cycling activity. And the cost benefit analysis is substantial, with the health benefit:cost ratio ranging from 13:1 to 415:1. Therefore any reduction in usage is likely to have a substantial cost increase for health.

Promoting cycle helmets gives people the impression that cycling is dangerous, but once again, the evidence doesn’t suggest that. Of all Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in the US from 1997 to 2007, cycling was a tiny proportion.

Activity

Average TBI fatalities/year

% of total

All causes

53014

100%

Motorists

7955

15%

Pedestrians

1825

3.4%

Motorcyclists

1361

2.6%

Cyclists

325

0.6%

I know that it’s going to sound ridiculous, but are we honestly suggesting that people wear helmets in their cars or whilst walking?

A psychologist friend of mine suggested that, were I really interested in reducing the risk of cycling, I should buy a blonde wig, dress in female clothing and wobble as I cycle. This would have a far greater effect on motorist’s behaviour towards me than any helmet (which incidentally, tends to cause drivers to drive more recklessly around you than if you’re not wearing a helmet). The real risks are available in this interesting quiz.

Just before I finish on this subject, I don’t normally lend much in the way of credence to the reporting of the Guernsey Evening Press, but I note that there was a report today claiming that young children forced to wear a helmet to the skate park would rather skate elsewhere. Do we think that children would be safer skating on the street? Obviously not, we simply need to learn that when children fall, they will hurt themselves, this is part of learning to live with risk and what risk we’re willing to undertake.

Risk

This is my biggest fear. I remember being told that were we to apply the health and safety norms of today to the invention of the car, it would never have been allowed. The idea that we regularly jump into a moving vehicle with such an appalling safety record and demand multiple locations that sell highly flammable liquid is simply incompatible with today’s orthodoxy.

We’ve reached the point of stifling innovation, talking of risk as though it were a bad thing without recognising the benefits. This is not a mindset that will serve us well. We do not need a future generation of risk averse health and safety executives. What we need are a number of wealth creators who recognise risk and learn to evaluate and understand it, not try to eliminate it.

I’ll finish with an anecdote from my past. I used to work in the information security department of a bank, the policemen of the IT systems if you like. Too frequently the talk was of removing risk, when the only effective means of removing risk was to switch the computers off. On one occasion I could see a manager contemplating it, not realising that he was contemplating shutting down the bank.

Are we on the brink of trying to remove risk to the same extent, not realising the wider consequences of our actions?

Whatever your thoughts on computing and all that goes with it, it’s receiving close attention at this point in time, partly because of the Cadastre and SAP, but mainly because of FTP and the desire for more to be done by computers so that we run a more efficient government. So this is a post about what all these different bits are (Yes I know that some of you will know this already) and why you should be keeping your eyes peeled for all that jazz over the coming months.

By the way, I was asked a question about the cadastre computer failure recently by a reporter from the Guernsey Press and I noticed how difficult it is to explain all of this to non computer geeks, so here we go.

Lets start with the assumption that you know what a computer is (I take it that you’ve either got one or know how to use one if you’re reading this). A computer is fine, but when you have an office environment with lots of sensitive information (that for some reason we refer to as data), there’s two things that you need to do. Connect all the computers so they can talk to each other and store the data safely.

Computers have a nasty habit of dying on you just at the most inconvenient time (as though there were such a thing as a convenient time for this to happen), so we store the data on servers. Servers are basically a super computer designed to hold lots of data.

Given that servers are just computers, albeit super computers, they also have a habit of dying every now and then. This is why we backup our servers. Backup is a fairly simple process where all the data on one server is copied to another server or disk on a regular basis (usually overnight as it tends to slow down the servers).

Now at some point or other, someone thought that if you connected all the servers together life would be better, as the servers would all communicate with each other and we’d hate servers to have a silo mentality. When you have a lot of servers together it’s called a data centre, for what I would hope are rather obvious reasons. Running a data centre is pretty important work; all the servers will want a very stable electricity supply with no spikes or power outages; all the servers tend to produce a lot of heat, which is bad for servers, so the room will need to be kept at a certain cool temperature; as though that wasn’t enough each server needs attention with updates and fixes that are called patches.

At this point I don’t blame you for being tired of the jargon, those who work with IT love their jargon as much as any other trade, it tends to make them feel separate and more knowledgeable than others, but it’s just jargon. Bear with it.

I think that you’re beginning to see the trend here in IT. You start with one computer, then you connect a lot of them together, then you connect them to a server, then you connect a lot of servers together. Yes, the next logical step is to put lots of data centres together in the same room, and that is what happened, but because no one organisation would want to do that on their own, it’s large computer companies that do it and this is what we call the cloud.

What is the cloud and why do people talk about it so much? We’ve all come across cloud technology by now, how many of us use apple iTunes Match, where all of our music is stored in the cloud. Microsoft sky drive is a way of storing our documents in the cloud. it means that we can access our information from any computer as long as there’s an internet connection.

Now imagine that the Cadastre were to store their data in the cloud instead of a data centre in Sir Charles Frossard House, not a lot of difference I hear you say, well no not really, not for the user. But there is a big difference for the IT department.

Servers need all that maintenance, patches, steady electricity, cooling, upgrading; and all of this requires someone to work in the IT department doing it. But it’s not that interesting and maintenance isn’t a high priority when you have exciting new projects, like SAP, that take up a lot of your IT department’s time. And I can’t blame the IT department for focussing on SAP, this is a big project that needs a lot of work and attention and it will also give us large benefits. But then servers aren’t a fine French wine, they don’t improve with age and eventually something breaks.

Cloud technology allows us to forget about all of that maintenance dullness, it allows departments and companies to concentrate on the things that are important for them. This is where world IT is going now, so why are the States of Guernsey not going there.

Before you think that the States of Guernsey are just luddites in this respect, there are a couple of things to think about. When we have a data centre, we know exactly where it is, but does anyone know where your iTunes match data physically is? Where in the world is the server with your Microsoft Sky Drive? This is an important question because if important government information sits in another country, it’s not the best idea, as well as potentially being illegal. I know that Microsoft’s european data centres are in Dublin and Amsterdam, neither of which I’d like to have my tax information. Apple has it’s european cloud in Luxembourg and as pleasant as Luxembourg is, I’m not sure that I’d want all that information sitting inside the EU (they do have a habit of prying into information that isn’t theirs). EU government’s could also demand, through their courts, for these companies to disclose all the data that they store on their servers and I most certainly don’t want my electronic census data being disclosed in an uncontrolled way to some nosy parker EU government.

But we do have local cloud providers, Calligo, Itex and others (as the BBC would say, other providers are available) who have their cloud computers sitting in Guernsey and Jersey, and as such, are the logical option for us to start thinking about cloud computing.

Computing is getting more and more complicated, and as it does so, the basics still need to be done. Any company that’s still doing the basics really would have to ask themselves, by now, why? It’s time the States of Guernsey did the same.

My first suggestion would be to think about the exact issue that caused the loss of data at the Cadastre. Currently the States of Guernsey are backing up their servers onto tape. To say that this is a little old fashioned is a little like saying that betamax is on its way out. What we should be thinking about is backing up data to the cloud, but that’s not even on the radar yet, only to replace tape back up with more computers. Personally I think that this is a little like moving from betamax to VHS just as the world is moving into digital downloads.

Finally there’s WAN (Wide Area Network). This is easily explained as the electronic pipes that connect all the computers of the States of Guernsey together, from the King Edward Hospital to the Tourist Information Centre on the front. From St Sampson High School to Sir Charles Frossard House. The best way to think of this is that we rent the pipe from a telecom company (currently JT) to use it. But the bigger the pipe, the more you pay for it, therefore the pipe from the PEH to Sir Charles Frossard House (because of the number of people) will be bigger than the pipe from the cadastre office. But if the data sits in the cloud, we don’t need a big fat pipe between the offices, all we need is an internet connection, and we all know that Commerce and Employment are working hard at the moment to bring those costs down. Indeed Commerce and Employment are working hard to facilitate cloud service providers on the island, so why aren’t we, as the States of Guernsey, taking advantage of this work?